First, I'd like to say that I stop by this forum every now and again just to peek at what's going on with Bryce, since it was the very first 3D program I had ever tried so many years ago. I still have a warm fuzzy place in my heart where I hold those fond memories of playing around with the program. But that being said, I also recall some not-so-fond memories, particularly when it came to the time it took to render images.

Just quickly looking through some threads here, I've noticed things like "took 2 weeks to render", etc. I have to wonder... why hasn't Bryce (or the current creators of the program) improved it's rendering engine yet? 2 weeks is an insane amount of time to wait for a still image render, particularly when there's no GI calculations involved (even with true GI it would be considered excessivly long by today's standards). With all the latest advancements in photorealistic rendering speed that have hit the industry lately, how do you guys do it? You must all have incredible amounts of patience and loyalty to the software. How do you professionals meet your deadlines and such?

I haven't worked in Bryce for years now, and after moving on to other 3D (modeling) applications that do high quality raytracing much faster, I'm shocked to come back to my "roots" and find out that there was virtually no improvement to the software's rendering speed after all these years. I feel for you guys. ;-)